


Nick Fury's Bad Day

by Setcheti



Series: The HR Stories [10]
Category: Fantastic Four (Movieverse), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, sexual innuendo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-11-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 16:43:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Nick Fury only thinks his bad day is getting better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nick Fury's Bad Day

Nick Fury was having a bad day. First off, something had attacked the city that morning. The local superheroes had come out and driven whatever it was off – it had looked like a sea monster in the news videos. They had even driven the thing off pretty quickly and with minimal property damage, which had been nice for a change.

The problem was which superheroes had come out to fight: Iron Man, the Thing, Johnny Storm, and Hawkeye. Setting aside the fact that Fury _did not want_ the Avengers and the Fantastic Four fighting together and he had _told_ the Avengers that, there was still the little problem of where all of the city’s other resident superheroes had been. That was half of the Fantastic Four unaccounted for, and two-thirds of the Avengers.

And in trying to find out where the missing people had been, Fury had discovered that his entire HR staff was missing too. The flu, they said. He’d called the emergency number and gotten Ms. Morris, who had sounded properly hoarse and had said she was only manning the emergency line in case an actual emergency came up. And then she had, supposedly, checked with her boss, who had passed word back that wondering where people not on SHIELD’s payroll were at was not a situation the HR department considered an emergency, although Fury was reminded to mark down who had been fighting that morning and who hadn’t been for Payroll so they wouldn’t pay any of their consultants who hadn’t been present. And then Ms. Morris had told him where to find the proper forms for that, coughed, and hung up on him.

He had his IT people trace the call. Amanda Morris was apparently at her boss’s apartment downtown, which would not be unusual if they all really did have the flu because the HR team tended to live in each other’s pockets a lot of the time. Although one of the IT people did allow that the call could have been routed so it just _looked_ like Morris was at Allison Clarke’s apartment. So Fury sent an agent over to said apartment, and the agent reported back in that yes, Morris was indeed there and they had heard Allison Clarke’s voice – not like you could mistake it for anyone else’s – in the apartment as well. And a heat-signature scan had registered four people in the apartment, so that would account for the entire HR staff. 

Fury still wasn’t entirely convinced – this was the former Badger Team they were talking about, he wouldn’t put it past them to fake being in Director Clarke’s apartment with the flu while they were actually off doing something that was probably ten different kinds of illegal because they weren’t an actual extraction team anymore – but there wasn’t much else he could do in that direction. He resolved to go by the apartment personally later to verify with his own eye that they were all really there. First, however, he needed to find the missing Avengers. He called Stark Tower, using the number he always called to get Tony Stark directly, and was routed to a message that sounded an awful lot like Stark’s AI which told him to leave a message and Mr. Stark would answer it when he wasn’t busy saving the world. Fury left a message demanding that the Avengers call in immediately, and then tossed himself back in his chair wondering if he should just go over there in person too.

And then his phone rang, and the caller ID said Avengers Tower. And it was requesting a video link, which Fury was more than happy to turn on. “Where was everyone this morning?!” he demanded immediately.

Tony Stark was kicked back in a chair with his feet up on the conference table, and he just rolled his eyes. “Not that it’s any of your business, but Bruce was in the middle of an experiment and Natasha is sick. Bruce thinks she has the flu or something.”

“And Captain Rogers?”

Stark shrugged. “He took off with Rhodey yesterday, they were going to go do soldier things together. I did ask if those were things that involved them not telling and the military not asking and Rhodey flipped me off, so not sure if that was a yes or a no.”

“Cap flipped you off too.” Barton said as he came in the door, plopping down next to Romanov, who had her head down on the table and really did look sick. “Nat’s got the flu, can we cut this short so she can go back to bed? It’s not like you need a report, we took care of that thing before it was even all the way out of the water, it didn’t even hurt anyone.”

“Oh, I know why he called.” Stark waved a dismissive hand. “He’s pissed because Johnny and Ben were out there with us.”

Fury scowled at him. “I do not like you working with the Fantastic Four, it’s a breach of security.”

“I dare you to say that to Ben Grimm’s face,” Stark snorted. “Or, for that matter, to Steve’s, since he has a massive fanboy crush on the guy.” Fury spluttered, and Stark shook an admonishing finger at him. “Mind out of the gutter, you’re mentally besmirching an American icon.”

“Captain Rogers is…”

“In awe of Ben because he was an astronaut.” Bruce Banner had come wandering in, wearing a lab coat that looked like he’d probably been wearing it for a couple of days and possibly sleeping in it as well. He dropped into his own chair, pushing Stark’s feet off the table as he sat down. “I know you don’t like the guy, but that’s not even physically possible – and I’m pretty confident in saying I _know_ the thought of finding out for sure would never even occur to either one of them.”

“Yeah, because Ben likes girls and Steve’s so vanilla he almost got a nosebleed when we accidentally pulled up porn on TV one night.” Barton cocked an eyebrow at Stark. “I’m startin’ to think you’re right, man, I think he’s still a virgin.”

“He’s not.” Everyone stared at Banner, who rolled his eyes. “As in he told me, not as in me and him and the Other Guy having a Ladyhawke-style threesome right under all of your noses.” He raised an eyebrow of his own at Stark. “Are you not getting enough lately, is that why your mind keeps detouring into improbable sexual situations? Because I can call Pepper and ask her to take the afternoon off to fix that for you.”

Stark actually choked, and Barton almost fell off his chair laughing. Romanov raised her head and glared at them all, then glared at Fury and stood up. “I am going back to bed, to dream pleasant dreams of torturing all of you to death slowly,” she rasped. “Disturb me again and die.”

She stalked out, sniffling, and the other three men looked at each other…and then burst out laughing again. Stark waved a hand at Fury. “Okay, you’ve shared enough of our fun, bye now,” he choked, and then the connection shut down and Fury’s screen went blank.  

Fury sat there, staring at the blank screen, for a full minute. He honestly wasn’t sure what to think about what he’d just seen. He was used to people being very nervous in front of him, because he was one intimidating son of a bitch and usually anyone he confronted was rightly afraid of what he might do to them if they pissed him off. He had apparently lost that effect on the Avengers right around the time his HR director had interfered with the way he was handling them, and this…encounter was the result.

Or at least, he wished he could blame the whole thing on Clarke, but he knew he couldn’t. The Avengers hadn’t ever been afraid of him, not really. He’d had a few of them by the short hairs and had kept control that way…and honestly, that was the only thing his HR director had taken away from him, she’d taken away his leverage and scolded him for misusing it.

And, more honestly, even he had to admit that he had been. If she hadn’t stepped in, his knee-jerk mishandling of the situation would eventually have backfired on him, possibly spectacularly. Because Fury was used to manipulating people, that was his job and he was damned good at it. But he’d lost sight of exactly who he’d been manipulating, and how, and…well, he’d done some damage in a few places, and it was damage he couldn’t really fix. 

Keeping Steve Rogers from his family was high up on that list. Blaming him for Phil Coulson’s death was at the top. And just now, overreacting to the idea of him having friends…well, it had placed. Truth be told, when Rogers had turned out to be alive, Fury had made a huge mistake. He’d expected Captain America, he’d arranged everything for Captain America. But Steve Rogers, the twenty-six year old Brooklynite…well, Fury had forgotten about him. He’d forgotten he was dealing with a fairly young man, rank and war record notwithstanding, who had been a college graduate working in a newspaper office before he’d racked up a few years of field combat as an Army captain leading a team who didn’t treat him like a comic book character. Fury had all but told him the comic book character was all anyone was interested in, and he’d reinforced that at every opportunity simply by acting like the man he was dealing with was only Captain America and nothing else.

He wasn’t. He was, by all accounts, a very normal now-twenty-seven year-old war veteran who had PTSD and liked pretty girls and probably had things he’d like to do to move on with his life. Fury wondered if the ‘soldier things’ he was out doing with Colonel Rhodes were on that list, or if the two of them were just palling around. He just hoped they weren’t palling around somewhere on an Air Force base with Rhodes trying to convince Rogers to sign on – Fury was sure the Air Force would be more than happy to give the man his pension, they’d probably even pair him up with War Machine for missions and pay him for that too. 

Even Fury knew that SHIELD consultants made shit wages, and the pay for field agents wasn’t much better, but he’d never been able to get the Council or the Appropriations Committee to see reason about it. A sudden thought came to him: He did actually know someone who might be able to get that fixed…someone who was supposedly at home with the flu along with her entire dangerous-as-hell former team. And Nick Fury smiled, for the first time that day. He didn’t have to go by the apartment to check, he knew for a damned fact that they weren’t there – now that he thought about it, really thought about it instead of just getting angry about it, it was fairly obvious that the former Badgers were working with the Avengers _and_ the Fantastic Four. So when they got back, maybe he could offer a trade. He’d turn a blind eye to whatever it was they’d been up to if they helped him chop through the tangle of red tape – literally or figuratively – that was holding back his people’s payroll budget. 

It did occur to him, briefly, that proposing a deal that even _looked_ like he was trying to blackmail that particular team might not be a good idea, but he dismissed it as a non-issue. Clarke wasn’t stupid, she knew it was better to work with him than against him. He resolved to go over to her apartment himself later to get the evidence he’d need to prove that the only one actually there was Morris, although he wasn’t going to let Morris know he’d been there. In the meantime, though, Fury’s day had taken a definite turn for the better, so he left his office and got back to work making at least some of the people under him have a bad day instead.

He might not have felt so chipper if he’d know that the proverbial shit was about to hit the fan in just a few hours, when live-streamed video of the drunken confessions of a supposedly rogue CIA agent named Max would hit the Internet. Or that when he went stomping over to Allison Clarke’s apartment to confront her about said confessions and how they’d been obtained, she and her team would actually be there, recovering from whatever flu-like virus it was that was going around. And he’d have been absolutely furious if he’d known that two days after that, in the middle of the fallout from the confessions and the resultant governmental shit-storm as everybody and their dog tried to prove they hadn’t been in on the now-revealed conspiracy, he would have incontrovertible proof that his HR team actually _had_ all come down with a virus…because he would be starting to come down with the virus himself.

But it would never once occur to him to wonder what experiment Bruce Banner had been so hard at work on the day he’d called Avengers Tower.


End file.
